Julian Casablancas says his ‘iron-fisted’ creative control of Strokes led to problems

Julian Casablancas has said that his “iron-fisted” control over The Strokes’ creative output led to a lot of problems within the band.

The singer admitted that, on the band’s most recent album ‘Comedown Machine’, he relinquished his control on purpose in order to ease the tensions that had arisen.

Speaking to Rolling Stone magazine, he said: “[On ‘Comedown Machine’] I maybe wasn’t kind of as iron-fisty as I had been in the past, but on purpose, because that created all these issues.

“I think it’s important for someone to – whether or not I think it’s better – for someone to have their say. I’m still writing a lot of parts and songs and we’re playing together, so it’s not like we’re mailing each other songs and that we never see each other.”

The Voidz frontman also divulged that he took issue when his Strokes bandmates said he wasn’t around during recording sessions for their 2011 album ‘Angles’ because they actually recorded the whole record “in a room, together”.

“The funny thing about ‘Angles’ is there was all that weird talk about recording it separately. We just had dinner in LA and we were all talking about it. And they forget that we sat in a room in a studio and were writing songs forever.

“That’s where we did the whole record. All the parts, the songs, in a room, together. We recorded them with two mics, and that was the foundation, and then we were going to go track the official recording.

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“That’s when they went and recorded stuff, and when the ‘Julian wasn’t there’ BS or whatever [started]. That was just because logistically, we’d never done a record like that.”

Casablancas added that he’s not particularly proud of The Strokes’ influence on music and fashion: “I don’t see that in any mega-positive way that I’m like, proud. Are more white people wearing Converse? Good. Mission accomplished.”